My whole point is that the hollowing out of the middle class and the huge growth in objective measures of inequality in the US are precisely because many other occupations are looking more and more like "sports star" economies.
E.g. just look at how the former "main streets" of many smaller towns in the US have been decimated. There used to be "local leaders" in retail in cities all over the US, now it's extremely difficult to compete if you don't have the scale of Amazon. Just look at all the recent stories about fears of AI taking jobs. E.g. it used to be that lots of people could get copywriting jobs. Now it looks like in a pretty short time frame that only the very, very best copywriters will be employable as so much other work is delegated to AI. Look at how most smaller news outlets have completely disappeared across the country. These smaller news outlets used to be fairly important factors in their community, but now they simply can't compete with the Internet giants for ad dollars.
I can go on and on, but the "winner take all" dynamic of sports economics has been spreading to pretty much any occupation that faces competition over the Internet.
One might say meritocracy might lead to technological advances leading to economies of scale, but the solution to an increasing income/wealth gap would not be getting rid of meritocracy, but rather redistributing some of the wealth so as to provide a floor for quality of life and quality of opportunities (I would hope).
Yep, that's pretty much what I was trying to say, so my apologies if I wasn't clear. I think the "quality of opportunities" is also a very important point - I made the argument elsewhere that there is no reason for many of the top schools to have such small class sizes in the first place. There is no reason with their huge endowments that they couldn't increase their class sizes and still only admit highly qualified applicants. That's still a meritocracy, but just ensures the "winners" are not arbitrarily selected by making the cutoff so high that you're making random decisions about who to admit (e.g. all ten of these folks had perfect SAT scores but we'll let this guy in because he had a "better personality").
People who argue against meritocracy seem to forget that it's the only proposed alternative to the "birthright"-ocracy that civilization has been trying to pry itself from the jaws of for centuries.
To put it another way, I'm not arguing against meritocracy; I'm arguing that it alone does not lead to good outcomes - i.e. I think it's necessary but not sufficient. It's like when people thought "bringing democracy" to all these countries without democratic institutions would be a good thing. Democracy is generally better than the alternative, but only if there are broad protections like equality under the law for minority groups, otherwise it's just the "2 wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner" issue. Meritocracy is similar. It's generally a good thing but not if it results in a very small number of people hoarding all the spoils while everyone else barely scrapes by.
Match fixing has been a perennial problem in sports.
Pretty sure a big fraction of that 99.99% love the top sports stars.
For example, major league baseball games have higher attendance than Single-A games.
I think one contributing factor you see behind so much increasing social strife, the resurgent interest in unions, etc. is the belief that unless you make it to a top job after a top school, you'll barely be scraping by your whole life.
Pure meritocracy in a "winner take all/most" economy leads to a very unstable society.